Do Flamingos Know They're Pink?
Articles about how technology works, who it serves, the systems around it, and what it all costs. Digital sovereignty, open source governance, and internet rights.
I Get No Ideas Inside the Machine
At Cables of Resistance, I ran a workshop asking if we can build hardware without capitalism. I was grieving what AI is doing to open source. Technologists need to see there's no innocent ground under the machine. It was always someone's land.…
Articles in your inbox.
New writing on what technology does, who it serves, and what it costs, whenever it lands. No more than that.
Or just take the RSS.
Optimism of the Intellect, Pessimism of the Will
With apologies to Gramsci. On the particular exhaustion of being certain a better world is possible, and then talking to people who have been taught that this one is the only one on offer.…
We Need More Than the EuroStack
The EuroStack initiative is hard, valuable work, and still not enough. Where Europe's flagship digital-sovereignty proposal runs into the same lack of political imagination it was meant to escape.…
The Luddite Stack: or How to Outlast the AI Ice Age
Subsidise, kill the competition, lock in the overpriced mess: the monopoly playbook now runs on AI. A guide to building the kind of stack that can outlast the subsidies when they end.…
The Future is Meaningless and I Hate It
The Semantic Web promised a digital future that actually understood us. Instead we got brute-force models passing probability off as comprehension. On the meaning we were promised and the noise we got.…
Mozilla: All We Want is a User Agent
Part frustration, part former appreciation. On Mozilla's turn toward 'privacy-first' advertising, and the quiet wish that it would go back to building a browser that works for the person using it.…
I Was Wrong About the Open Source Bubble
A follow-up, and a correction. Revisiting the open source bubble argument after the responses came in, including the ones that stopped at the title.…
Suspending X: Brazil’s Ongoing Struggle to Govern Big Tech
Musk called it a free-speech violation. Brazil called it refusing to follow the law. Past the inflammatory tweets, what the suspension of X reveals about whether any state can govern Big Tech.…
Is the Open Source Bubble about to Burst?
Open source isn't a hype bubble like crypto or the metaverse. It's something stranger: a real one, built on how completely the digital world has come to depend on work it barely funds.…